Year: 2005

I noticed Festus growling when he would eat when I got back from England in August. Took him to my vet (which, admittedly, I hadn’ t done in a two and a half years b/c he had been in fine health and had read that the vaccines were good for three). They said he needed his teeth cleaned, so had that done, but as time went by I noticed he’d still growl sometimes, and that he wasn’t eating as much (which I chalked up to Steve feeding him chicken, as he does all the courtyard cats, every evening). The growling got more pronounced, so I decided to take him to Dr. Caroline Oeben, The Cat Doctor. She diagnosed him with LPS, and we tried to treat it initially with just steroid injections to reduce the swelling so he could eat. That helped a bit, but we decided to go ahead and have his rear teeth extracted, which was done by Dr. Boyd on Tuesday. Festus seemed fine after that, though still not eating much, and he really didn’t like his pain medicine. Saturday morning I gave it to him in his food, which he ate about a third of. He came in about 1:30 this morning, and about 15 minutes later started growling. I gave him his pain medicine, but a couple of minutes later he spit it up. I took him to the emergency clinic, and they said his gums were really swollen, either as a residual effect of the sutures, the stomatitis, or both. They gave him some antibiotics, some steroids, and some pain medicine, and I brought him home around 4:30. He continued to growl for another half hour or so. This morning, he is much happier, and ate a bit, but can tell it is still bugging him. The new pain medicine he takes much more readily than the old. I’ll be taking him to Dr. Oeben tomorrow in the morning…hope that this is just a bump in the road to recovery.